This City

could use more seraphs.Anything with wings, really—

a falcon, a swallowtail.Ravenous for marvels, I slit opena chrysalis. Inside,no caterpillar mid-morph.Only its ghost in a horror of cells.I pinch the luminous mashof imaginal discsand shudder, imaginingthe mechanics of disintegration.The wormy larva—whole,then whorled. A wonderit did not die. Even now,smeared against my skin, it beams

About this Poem

“I’ve lately turned to the natural world for instructions on how to survive, and the mystery of the chrysalis tells us that to transform into a new being, the larva must first submit to a period akin to death. This should alarm me, but instead, it gives me much-needed hope that our individual and collective seasons of pain and death will ultimately lead to seasons of resurrection and glory.”—Eugenia Leigh

Author

Eugenia Leigh

Eugenia Leigh is the author of Blood, Sparrows and Sparrows (Four Way Books, 2014). She is a PhD student at the University of Illinois at Chicago's Program for Writers and lives in Chicago, Illinois